Yesterday, in my sermon on Revelation 5, we talked about having a faith that sounds like a conquering lion but looks like a slaughtered lamb. I used this video on Jeremy Courtney and his organization "The Preemptive Love Coalition."
This quote from Loren Johns is fantastic:
The Lamb of Revelation is manifestly no cute, little nonviolent Lamb. It is a powerful and courageous Lamb who, through his consistent nonviolent and faithful witness, conquered evil. He did not deny the reality of evil or the reality of violence or “lie down with the lion” in some utopian idealism. […] Rather, the Lamb overcame evil by refusing to adopt its methods and its rules and bearing its brunt. And he serves in the Apocalypse as a consistent and trustworthy model for believers facing the harsh realities of civic pressures to conform to the expectations of Graeco-Roman society. - Loren Johns, professor of New Testament at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary
May we continue to learn what it means to be particularly and peculiarly Christian in this world.